The present disclosure relates to systems and methods for medical imaging and, more particularly, to systems and methods for enhancing images acquired using any of a variety of imaging modalities.
The most common way of extracting information from medical images remains visual analysis by a radiologist, or another trained specialist, which is aimed at determining if an object (e.g. tumor) is present or grading a feature which spans a large portion of the image (e.g. classifying the lung tissue as being healthy or having emphysema). Objects in an image can be hard to detect if the image has a low contrast-to-noise ratio. Increasing object contrast is especially difficult in medical images as it can lead to increased radiation dose or significantly increased scan times. Thus, low contrast-to-noise ratios are especially common in medical imaging. Various methods have been used to enhance medical images, such as smoothing, edge enhancement, histogram equalization, and denoising algorithms. In general, most of these try to reduce noise in the image while maintaining desired features, or to increase contrast in the image.